Chuck Close

Past
Jan 10–Mar 27, 2020

Having employed a variety of media throughout his career, Chuck Close has created a body of work that positions portraiture—and the careful rendering of the human face—as his primary subject of interest.

Chuck Close

Chuck Close is known for his innovative conceptual portraiture, depicting his subjects, which are transposed from photographs, into visual data organized by gridded compositions. Throughout his childhood and adolescence, Close used art as a means of navigating a learning disability. He continued to develop his artistic skills through private art lessons, drawing and painting from live models. As a student at the University of Washington (BA, 1962), and then at Yale (BFA 1963; MFA 1964), he began to emulate the styles of Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, considering himself a third-wave Abstract Expressionist and as he explored this vocabulary he pivoted from biomorphism to figuration.